webshit weekly
An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the first week of November, 2018.
Apple's New Map
November 01, 2018
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An Internet cares a lot about every single detail about Apple's also-ran mapping service. Hackernews bemoans Apple's inability to display street names, then debates whether streets should even have names. The article author seems to think it extremely praiseworthy that Apple is using satellite surveillance to catalog the contents of our backyards, but Hackernews is mostly focused on trading anecdotes about the hazards of using Google or Apple maps outside of Silicon Valley.
Thelio – System76
November 02, 2018
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Some strangers on the internet promise to send you a computer one day, if you'll just give them thousands of dollars now. Hackernews enjoys pretending there are technical advantages to the promised computers, but the real reason everyone is abuzz is much simpler: someone other than Apple has finally envisioned a computer with rounded corners.
An error message, still found in Windows 10, is a mistake from 1974
November 03, 2018
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An Internet is surprised that nobody fixed some bad software. The error predates most of Hackernews experience with computers, so this is designated the monthly nostalgia depository. As usual, this work includes cataloging every protocol or program Hackernews ever used, then trading recommendations for reimplementations of all of them. Near the end, Hackernews reinvents filenames from first principles, experimenting with the possibility that maybe file systems could be content-aware. The threads containing heresy are truncated and participants are quietly uninvited to the Christmas party.
As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men
November 04, 2018
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Some academics discover that people assert their desires as they grow less subservient to others. The Hackernews Mens Rights Activists arrive to carefully and thoroughly incorrect actual breathing women about all of their dangerous and wayward misconceptions regarding a wide range of Father Knows Best topics, including feminism, reproductive rights, economics, statistics, and, in a crowning achievement, someone's direct personal experience. The virtue of manhood is saved, but a few Hackernews are left wondering why chicks get so snippy when you try to explain this stuff.
Programming Paradigms for Dummies: What Every Programmer Should Know (2009) [pdf]
November 05, 2018
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An academic considers it important for everyone to understand a set of topics that are best exemplified in the weird-ass niche projects the author's friends are running. Hackernews mostly doesn't read this, but knows a jumping off point when it shows up, so this thread becomes the Hackernews software-engineering thinkpiece pitch party. The original author cruises past and says hello on the way to the next funding agency.
VirtualBox E1000 Guest-to-Host Escape
November 06, 2018
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An Internet finds the six millionth bug in the worst virtualization software on the planet, and commendably releases the information immediately, allowing informed users to take protective measures, such as switching to a hypervisor that wasn't written by complete dipshits. Hackernews mulls it over and decides that Oracle had this coming, because Oracle is generally a pack of assholes, but those Hackernews with a vested interest in Ritualized Disclosure are careful to point out that nobody should release any knowledge without consulting Hackernews first.
The Illustrated TLS 1.3 Connection: Every Byte Explained
November 07, 2018
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Hackernews was so in love with the last version of this that they made sure to fawn over it again today. Like last time, there are ten votes for every comment, because nobody actually read it, but at least this time the author didn't have to show up and apologize for this single-page static website falling over under load.